An image forming apparatus includes: a document reading section; a character detection section detecting, based on image data of a document obtained through reading by the document reading section, characters included in an image formed on the document; a character concentration detection section detecting concentration of the characters detected by the character detection section; a character direction detection section detecting a direction of the characters whose concentration detected by the character concentration detection section is in a preset specified concentration range; and a document direction determination section determining, based on the direction of the characters detected by the character direction detection section, a direction of the image formed on the document as a document direction, wherein the character direction detection section, upon determination that the image on the document is a monochromatic image, defines, as the specified concentration range, a concentration range higher than predefined first concentration.

Biometric data are obtained from a biometric sensor on a stand-alone computing device, which may contain an ASIC, connected to or incorporated within it. The computing device and ASIC, in combination or individually, capture biometric samples, extract biometric features and match them to a locally stored, encrypted template. For extra security, the biometric matching may be enhanced by the use of an entered PIN. The biometric template and other sensitive data are encrypted using hardware elements of the computing device and ASIC, together with a PIN hash. A stored obfuscated Password is de-obfuscated and may be released to the authentication mechanism in response to a successfully decrypted template and matching biometric sample. A different de-obfuscated password may be released to authenticate the user to a remote computer and to encrypt data in transit. This eliminates the need for the user to remember and enter complex passwords on the device.

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for indexing application pages of native applications that operate independent of a browser application on a user device. In one aspect, a method includes instantiating a virtual machine emulating an operating system of a user device; instantiating, within the virtual machine, a native application that generates application pages for display on a user device within the native application; accessing, within the virtual machine, application pages of the native application, and for each of the application pages: generating application page data describing content of the application page, the content described by the application page data including text that a user device displays on the application page when the user device displays the application page; and indexing the application page data for the native application in an index that is searchable by a search engine.

An image processing system and method of operation includes: a source image having source pixels; homogeneous blocks in the source image having a block color; a homogeneous region in the source image formed by merging the homogeneous blocks having the block color within a color threshold; a text background region having text pixels and background pixels in the homogeneous region with the text background region having a texture feature above a texture threshold and a region size above a region size threshold; and a binary text mask representing the text pixels and the background pixels for displaying on a device.

A method for area recognition is disclosed. The method includes: recognizing an edge in an identification (ID) document image, the edge being in a predefined direction of the ID document; recognizing at least one information area in the ID document image based on the recognized edge; and cutting the information area to obtain at least one character area.

A reading machine that operates in various modes includes image correction processing is described. The reading device pre-processes an image for optical character recognition by receiving the image and determining whether text in the image is too large or small for optical character recognition processing by determining that text height falls outside of a range in which optical character recognition software will recognize text in a digitized image. If necessary the image is resized according to whether the text is too large or too small.

Systems and methods for identifying transformations to be applied to at least part of a document image for improving the OCR quality. An example method comprises: constructing, by a computer system, an ordered list of transformations to be applied to an image comprising a character string, each transformation corresponding to a hypothesis asserted with respect to one or more characteristics of the image; applying, to the image, a leading transformation on the list to produce a transformed image; evaluating a quality of the transformed image to produce a quality estimate; and updating the list in view of the quality estimate.

A method and system for automatic correction of skewing of digital images. A captured digital image s provided. An initial angle of rotation is determined by sampling test angles of rotation of the input image and analyzing resultant rotated images to determine a resultant rotated image with a highest number of substantially empty lines. The input image is rotated by the initial angle of rotation to generate a first rotated image which is processed to determine a refining angle of rotation as follows: determining text line areas of the first rotated image; generating a representative line of each text line area; calculating a slope of each representative line; and determining an aggregated slope of all the representative lines. The aggregated slope is converted to the refining angle of rotation. The first rotated image is rotated by the refining angle of rotation to result in a final rotated image.

A method and system for automatic correction of skewing of digital images. A captured digital image s provided. An initial angle of rotation is determined by sampling test angles of rotation of the input image and analyzing resultant rotated images to determine a resultant rotated image with a highest number of substantially empty lines. The input image is rotated by the initial angle of rotation to generate a first rotated image which is processed to determine a refining angle of rotation as follows: determining text line areas of the first rotated image; generating a representative line of each text line area; calculating a slope of each representative line; and determining an aggregated slope of all the representative lines. The aggregated slope is converted to the refining angle of rotation. The first rotated image is rotated by the refining angle of rotation to result in a final rotated image.

When there is a possibility that a third character region is redundantly selected in both a case where the line extraction process is performed starting from a first character region and a case where the line extraction process is performed starting from a second character region located in a line different from a line containing the first character region, the line recognition unit determines which line to incorporate the third character region in, by comparing a case of incorporating the third character region into the line starting with the first character region, with a case of incorporating the third character region into the line starting with the second character region.